Young Woman with Lemon 1685 - 1690

Curator: Oh, she looks as though she’s about to share a secret. Something just mischievous enough to be charming. Editor: Indeed! What we have here is "Young Woman with Lemon", a late 17th-century painting, around 1685-1690, attributed to Godfried Schalcken, now residing at the Rijksmuseum. Schalcken's play with light is exquisite, don’t you agree? The oil paint positively glows. Curator: Absolutely, the lighting’s theatrical! Like she’s caught in a spotlight, and that shimmering dress, oh, the materiality practically vibrates. What about the symbolic weight of the lemon? The bittersweet life, the momentary burst of sourness? Editor: Precisely. The Baroque loved those sorts of playful allusions, and its rendering emphasizes form and texture while implying narratives beneath the surface. Note the peeling lemons that echo a spiral form in miniature; is this meant to remind the viewer that our pleasure may be as transitory as a curled fruit rind? Curator: And the landscape lurking through the window, practically devoured by the shadows. It really does pull one into contemplating what might lay outside the immediacy of this very framed experience. She's so self-contained, really, framed within frames—window, painting—yet it hints to the much wider scope of life… Editor: A perfect observation! One notes the contrast to this genre-painting. Schalcken plays with both light and dark, both near and far. She has this private experience on display here as we observe her. Her inward turn is balanced with the open window beyond, and by our own act of viewing. It’s almost as though she's daring us to taste it, the lemon of course and, well, life too, perhaps? Curator: Hmm… perhaps that initial sense of charm holds something much darker. All the play and framing here seems like the setup to… what? It’s deeply uncanny, how she offers yet withdraws something vital at the same moment. Editor: I can appreciate that response! It's what makes viewing art so deeply enriching, that tension between interpretation and affect. Curator: And perhaps too that we, as audience, have brought our own stories to view.